Digital photography or classic (film) - Files, slides, or photographs
by Radu Grozescu, digital photographer in Bucharest, Romania

Digital photography or classic, film photography ?

Just a few years ago, if you intended to print (offset) color images at a decent quality in a magazine or brochure you needed transparencies (slides), usually medium format from 6x4.5 to 6x7cm. Even the 35mm format slides were often not enough, not to mention 35mm negative film and the photographs from 35mm.

In the past three years the digital photography technology literally exploded and now for any practical purpose match or exceeds the results from 35mm systems, with some caveats detailed below.

In fact, any current digital SRL (single lens reflex) camera will offer greater flexibility and often higher quality than 35mm film.

Even if the digital compact and prosumer cameras have now from 4 to 8 megapixel sensors, you should be aware that their results can not get close to those from a DSLR.

This is not the place to enter into detailed explanations, it is enough to know that the actual image quality does not depends only on how many megapixels a camera have but to many other factors, the most important being the physical size of the sensor.

Digital photography advantages:

• real time feed back - you can check the image and, if necessary, make adjustments and take another one. When appropriate, we shoot directly ito a computer so you can check the images on the spot.
  
• it is a first generation image, as opposed to a scanned slide or photograph
  
• digital images have no grain so they enlarge better (in some condition they suffer from noise, but we are talking professional digital photography here)
  
• very fast turnaround, because even the photographer is doing some digital magic on them the classic processing lab is avoided and so is the scanning time. We even deliver the proofs using the Internet so no transportation time and expenses here.
  
• better cost control, because you pay only for the images chosen, avoiding film and processing expenses for the whole shooting and also scanning costs which, when you demand quality, are quite high.